I grew up with Autoweek, Competition Press, Sports Car Graphic.....
Several years ago I dropped all of them. Right after Autosemiweekly came out.
I have been getting Racer lately and have been plesantly surprised. And it's getting better!
But, I'm an old Phart. I like Vintage to drool over the racing cars of my yout.
(except when Tom gets upset with the crummy factual reporting)......

The problem is in the journalism courses the kids go through today. Nobody is a REAL reporter anymore. It's all done on laptops. I swear nobody GOES to the races anymore.
Maybe the problem is that all the races are on TV and the coverage comes from watching the races there!

I've been a subscriber for 40 years and at one time, had every issue back to Vol. 1, No. 1, albeit a reproduction. My subscription is up in November and I'd decided not to renew. Then I got a $10 for a two year renewal offer, which I thought I'd do, because how cheap can I be? Then the latest edition arrived and, upon further review, I decided it really wasn't worth $10 for 24 issues.

Tom, we think alike. My current subscription, which runs out in early 2013, is a three year deal which I got for $15. You wait long enough when your sub nears it end and the price seems to drop markedly. I have already decided that it has to be a really, really good deal to get me to extend my sub. The last issue was just rubbish; I flipped through it in less than 10 minutes. The only thing I read all the way through was Peter Egan's column. (Incidentally, saw Peter race his Crossle at Road America this past Sunday). The rest was useless pap. Most of their copy now is road tests, and I don't care to read about how someone started an engine and engaged a gear. So what? Unless I am considering buying that very car, I don't care. Racing has essentially disappeared from the mag. Hasn't been "& Track" for many years. As I said, it lost its way many years ago and just keeps getting worse.

I have every issue since I discovered the mag in 1956. Have been subscribing the last ten or so years mainly because I did not want to break the chain and in hopes that it would improve. Now with this apparent relaunch in the works, I may just stick with it for a while longer. But it has to be markedly better. Of course, it really can't get any worse, but I want to see a very significant change that would make R&T a magazine to which I would look forward to receiving, not just Motor Trend Light, which it is now.

As I said, I am not familiar with Octane. But if the new R&T has features that elevate it from its current state of mind numbing road tests of Toyota Priuses, that is good. Further, if it starts featuring racing once again, great. We shall see.

I emmigrated to Canada in 1973 never having seen a copy of Road & Track that I can recall. I corrected that mistake very quickly. By 1980 I had almost complete runs of R&T, Sports Car Graphic and Sports Car Illustrated and could quote from virtually every issue

I was so obsessed with R&T that I managed to get myself accepted into Journalism school with the sole intent of writing for R&T. I washed out as they say...

By the mid eighties R&T was all over-Manney was gone, John Lamm was gone and Rob Walker went at about this time didn't he?

I occasionally looked at a copy of R&T after this and wondered what had gone wrong. As Henry Manney III said to me at Laguna Seca in about 1981 "It is a know nothing magazine , with a know nothing staff and a know nothing editor". How right he was.

I echo all those who feel R&T lost the plot many years ago. I've been receiving R&T every month simply because my very kind brother buys me a subscription every year. I wouldn't subscribe if it was left to me. Given the circumstances, I enjoy reading it - road tests of supercars never wears thin with me. I didn't know they were moving from Newport Beach to Detroit. If they're getting rid of their staff - Peter Egan, Joe Rusz, etc., it's all over.

At a slight tangent, does anyone know if R&T still has an image archive and if so, whether it's possible to access it as an outsider? I did try a couple of years ago for work purposes, but was told it was 'staff only'. Seems a shame if that's still the case, as it must have some great images from the '50s to the '70s - if it still exists in-house.

I will miss Peter Egan, but he's sure to be accessible somehow after it all shakes out.

Peter is still writing for them, at least as of this past Sunday. He moved to Wisconsin from So. California a goodly number of years ago and was not part of the in house staff that was let go en masse. In other words, while on the staff, my impression is that he has been not in house but somewhat more of a contributor. What I heard Sunday is that for the time being he is still writing for them, but is unsure of what is coming down the road.

Isn't Peter Egan officially an "editor at large"? I haven't subscribed to R&T in years (I go to the library pretty much to read his column and glance through the rest), but aside from the column Egan used to get the occasional feature as well.

The move comes as a surprise to me too-I don't follow magazines as much as I used to. I only regularly buy two (Classic and Sports Car and The Rodder's Journal), and for a long time I was in charge of magazines at the Borders store I worked in, so I usually found out about publishing changes and whatnot.

Octane, for those who haven't read it, tries to be a sort of luxury lifestyle magazine for old cars. You don't often find articles about things like old Morris sedans or weird French micro cars (like you would in C&SC), but plenty of articles about sports cars and old exotics. Decent event coverage, if memory serves (I browse through it occasionally). Lots of stuff about expensive things to buy. Columns by Nick Mason and Jay Leno (I kind of like Leno's, he often talks about interesting weird old cars).

More changes at Road & Track. After last fall's purge of the entire staff, I feared the worst. But so far, much to my surprise I might add, the content has improved with the new editor and staff, now based in Detroit after deserting California. Of course, the only way was up, after the years of damage that Thos L. Bryant and Matt DiLorenzo did to what used to be a great mag. The last two issues have been a definite step up, with more than one cursory article devoted to racing. Hopefully, the new crew is bring the "& Track" portion of the title back, after a decade or two of the mag being nothing but a warmed over Motor Trend, full of nothing but uninteresting road tests.

That may be good news; now the bad. The mag continues to shrink. First of all, the page count has shrunk by about 50% from a few years ago. Now it is around 100 pages per issue. Secondly, the physical size of the mag has shrunk also. It is almost pocket book size now, rather than magazine size. Third, and this just happened, is that the number of issues per year has been cut back from the normal 12 to just 10. One would not know that if close attention to the cover date was not taken. There has been no notice of any kind of which I am aware to alert the reader to the reduced publication schedule. One would think that such a major change would at least have been addressed by the editor in his monthly column, but not a word. I would suspect that there will be many surprised readers next month when the next issue does not arrive at all.

More changes at Road & Track. After last fall's purge of the entire staff, I feared the worst. But so far, much to my surprise I might add, the content has improved with the new editor and staff, now based in Detroit after deserting California. Of course, the only way was up, after the years of damage that Thos L. Bryant and Matt DiLorenzo did to what used to be a great mag. The last two issues have been a definite step up, with more than one cursory article devoted to racing. Hopefully, the new crew is bring the "& Track" portion of the title back, after a decade or two of the mag being nothing but a warmed over Motor Trend, full of nothing but uninteresting road tests.

That may be good news; now the bad. The mag continues to shrink. First of all, the page count has shrunk by about 50% from a few years ago. Now it is around 100 pages per issue. Secondly, the physical size of the mag has shrunk also. It is almost pocket book size now, rather than magazine size. Third, and this just happened, is that the number of issues per year has been cut back from the normal 12 to just 10. One would not know that if close attention to the cover date was not taken. There has been no notice of any kind of which I am aware to alert the reader to the reduced publication schedule. One would think that such a major change would at least have been addressed by the editor in his monthly column, but not a word. I would suspect that there will be many surprised readers next month when the next issue does not arrive at all.

Tom

Thank you for the update Tom. I was wondering how come the next issue has not arrived yet. I agree that the last issue shows that the mag is getting better. I enjoyed the article on the W125. Yesterday I found out that in the May issue there will be feature on the Lotus 49 R2.

Subscribers to Veloce Today will have learned from Michael T. Lynch's article, that the R&T archives have been acquired by the Revs Program at Stanford University. " ... online ... future ... " Seems like good news.

They don't seem to want to hang on to their subscribers either. I have R&T all the way from 1960 and despite the decline in quality would still have renewed my subscription, but found no way to do it! Impossible to get any kind of contact with them - well, I did not want to try a phone call from Finland.
It turned out my sub had changed to an ongoing one, but as my credit card details had changed they could not charge the next year. I realized too late, and as there would have been a delay of some six months before a new sub kicks in, simply did not bother to do anything about it.
At no stage have I received any kind of notice from R&T. Still get silly e-mail adverts of all sorts of paraphernalia in their name though.

Though Road and Track is the featured magazine in this thread it is true of many motor magazines today that the journalists have probably gone to college or even university to study journalism. In my opinion they are often taught by failed journalists who are devoid of open minds to think up new ideas for stories. I am the first to admit that I am not a motoring writer, just a storyteller, and I feel that there are too few journalists who can tell a decent story. THey are stuck in the WHo,, Why WHat WHen and How, dictum and so when they become Editors they do not have the breadth of knowledge of their subject. I feel that to be a motoring journalist you have to be able to turn your hand at the history of cars, the industry, motorsport, drivers and personalities. Formula 1 seems to be the only area of motor sport yet it is probably the only area of motor sport that is totally ruled by third party public relations people who supply a lot of the copy and take their drivers after the race round a pen going from TV company to TV company.

There are millions of stories out there waiting to be found but you have to work at it. I was saddened recently to receive a note from someone who was writinng another book on the Ferrari GTO. Gawd there is truly nothing left there that has not been covered by true historians of the marque. Why not try something on the 340 Series Ferraris as there are some great stories there rather than having to fall back on the same old stories revamped with a few more flowery adjectives.

Subscribers to Veloce Today will have learned from Michael T. Lynch's article, that the R&T archives have been acquired by the Revs Program at Stanford University. " ... online ... future ... " Seems like good news.

That's good news, as I tried to access the R&T archive last year but was told it was 'for internal use only'. Very helpful.

I stumbled upon Revs last year (via the Collier Collection) and it has great potential, though still very much work in progress. The RevsCat(alogue) is incredibly slow to load so you tend to give up, assuming it's broken, but it does appear eventually. And as yet, very few of the images on there have thumbnails, which makes them a bit difficult to choose from, but they say they're working on that , too. Fingers crossed.

My May Road & Track came yesterday and I was quite surprised to see that the magazine has had a complete makeover. Of course, it was way overdue, as R&T, under the hand of Thos L Bryant, has had a precipitous decline into abject mediocrity in the last 15 or so years. It has deteriorated from being an enthusiast's magazine into being just a clone of Motor Trend. That, by the way, is far from a compliment! The only way for the mag to go was up, as it was bottoming out as being nothing more that a road test monthly.

At any rate, the new R&T is very, very different from the recent past. Whether or not it will be better remains to be seen.

Hardly anything has been carried over. New graphics, new design, new font, new structure, etc. I noticed a lot less road tests, which to me is good, as I never read them unless I am interested in buying such a car in the immediate future. The new design, to my eye, is very jumbled, though. Lots and lots of small boxes with 'factoids' in them. As has been mentioned on the Motor Sport thread, for whatever reason this trend seems to be everywhere, and frankly, it is annoying. Not much delineation between articles and sections, which is a bit confusing. A lot of room for smoothing things out, as it is a bit of a mish-mash at the moment.

They promise more pages, but I find that a bit at odds with the fact that they have just downsized from a monthly to 10 issues a year.

Seems they have gone back to a more sporting nature in recent issues. The new format is OK, the contents much more important. Keep up the good work and we will have the old R & T back. Nice article on Rossi and the Lotus 49. It would appear from the mast heads that R & T and C & D are one. Guess R & T will be their sporting publication and C & D will be commercial, with road tests of cars most of us can't afford.

Peter DeLorenzo, editor/owner/proprietor of autoextremist.com, offers his observation on the Road & Track makeover. Peter is a keen observer of the scene as well as not bashful at offering his opinion, and when he speaks people listen. Hence, I find his thoughts worthwhile and are posted here:

Road & Track. Editor-in-Chief's Note: Yes, car magazines are barely hanging on, what with the oppressive nonstop frenzy of the Internet that defines the new media world. And we may very well be arriving at the sunset of the car magazines' influence over enthusiast consumers - and the manufacturers - alike. But with that said, it looks like Road & Track magazine isn't going down without a fight. With everyone predicting its imminent demise after the move from the sunny confines of Newport Beach to Ann Arbor, the mag comes out swinging with a contemporary redesign that has jump-started the predictable tome with a bang. The new look, feel and tone takes chances, it's adventurous and it does it all with a style that's freshly undeniable. Well done. - PMD